Gallery Notes - John Mitchell Fine Paintings

Gallery Notes
SUMMER 2014
JOHN MITCHELL
FINE PAINTINGS
This summer will mark a decade for our firm in Glyn’s
House, or 44 Old Bond Street to the postman. On relocating
from 160 New Bond Street to this former milliners with its
distinctive pink and white 1906 façade, an American
colleague proclaimed from the street in plain New York
language: “The building is your advert!”
This was a convincing quip in the context of an industry then absorbing so many new art fairs,
art advisors and the expanding reach of individual websites. Today’s premium on retail space
in Bond Street and its neighbourhood has witnessed massive, ‘Monopoly’ style transactions
to secure leases, inevitably forcing out both established art dealerships and smaller galleries.
Various recent articles and interviews have chronicled the rise of the big fashion emporia,
bringing into question the very relevance and sustainability of a ‘Bond Street’ gallery.
Now in its third premises in the same street, this eighty year old family partnership remains
first and foremost a gallery based business. We feel very fortunate to have this location but,
nonetheless, participate in major art fairs and art ‘weeks’, we advertise regularly and actively
use our website to the best of its potential. Indeed, albeit yet more ‘advertising’, our recently
added News section will, hopefully, draw attention to the more interesting aspects of our
trade, such as new pictures, exceptional trouvailles and offer some commentary on exhibitions
in museums and other galleries.
Our short News features will not replace our tried and tested Gallery Notes even if they will
appear more frequently on the website. It bears repeating that Gallery Notes is anything but a
comprehensive new stock catalogue with outsourced research and scholarship, and its ongoing
appeal may derive from the brevity of content!
We are delighted to include three newcomers in this June 2014 Gallery Notes, namely paintings
by Cerrini, Willem van de Velde the Elder and Prevost the Younger. We are proud that, to the
best of our knowledge, none of these pictures have been offered for sale over the last thirty
years, if at all, and only the Guillemet and Berjon paintings are recorded in any recent literature.
We will be taking part in Art Antiques London in Kensington Gardens (12-18 June), Masterpiece
at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea (26 June-2 July) and Master Paintings Week here in the gallery
(4-11 July). We very much look forward to welcoming you to these exhibitions.
William Mitchell
June 2014
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Gian Domenico Cerrini (1609 -1681)
A Vanitas: Time revealing Truth
oil on canvas, 60 x 73in (151.5 x 185cm)
PROVENANCE
Possibly painted for Tomasso Fantacci circa 1670 in Florence.
Private collection, Belgrade, Serbia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Francesco Federico Mancini, Gian Domenico Cerrini, il Cavalier Perugino tra classicismo
e barocco, September 2005 -January 2006, Palazzo Baldeschi al Corso, Perugia. Silvana
Editoriale, Milano (2005)
‘Veritas filia temporis’: Truth is the daughter of time. Gnarled with age, Father Time’s left
hand points to a sensuous young woman reclining on a poster bed. One of two heavy and
ornate curtains has been pulled across revealing Time’s daughter, Truth, who is holding up
a posy of flowers in her right hand. A string of pearls runs through her blond hair and a gold
band studded with precious stones is wrapped around her upper left arm. An open book lies
beside her together with more gold chains and bracelets with stones. A small lap dog,
symbolising Vanity or even Envy, stares up at the young woman’s face. Depicted naked apart
from a dark blue cloth across her left thigh, Truth is reclining against a tasselled cushion as
she gazes straight out at the viewer. Time’s right hand rests on an hour-glass with its sand
almost full below. He too looks out at us and behind him, beyond his huge wings, an obelisk,
an allusion to the sun as the generator of life, rises up above some trees. In front of the halfdrawn curtain on the far side of the bed, a skeleton, representing Death, leers out from the
deep shadow. In its right hand of bare bones, Death holds a large scythe over his back.
The recent and extensive cleaning of this newly discovered painting by Gian Domenico Cerrini
uncovered the figure of Death which had been intentionally obliterated from the composition
with over-painting. Death’s sinister reinstatement has radically altered the picture’s
meaning. It has gone from a Vanitas theme with the jewellery, flowers, book and dog alluding
to earthly conceit, to a more complex one, namely Father Time drawing a veil aside to expose
the naked figure of Truth watched over by Death. Truth is the only figure bathed in light which
enforces the idea that she lies hidden until unearthed by Time. Although Truth portrayed as a
young beauty was one of the most popular figures in Baroque allegory, scenes that included
an actual skeleton as a personification of Death instead of Father Time’s habitual hour-glass
and scythe were quite infrequent. Our dramatic and bespoke rendering of this theme takes
the Vanitas idea to a new, more disturbing level. Despite her beauty and beguiling pose, Truth
stands to lose it all; here she is at the mercy of Death in a literal and physical sense as his left
arm extends out behind her shoulders in a feigned embrace. Truth’s jewels epitomize her
pointless, narcissistic possessions that Death will soon steal, and her bouquet of flowers
become symbols of brevity and inevitable decay. In pointing at her, Time isn’t just displaying
how purity is vindicated in the end, with truth coming out in the long run, he is also identifying
for us his next victim. He will take away her life and also destroy her youth and beauty. And in
revealing the truth, Time also metes out justice.
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5
Gian Domenico Cerrini A Vanitas: Time revealing Truth
6
Cerrini, also known as Il Cavalier Perugino, painted three other large allegories on the
Time and Truth theme; two are in the Gemäldegalerie in Kassel, Germany and the more
famous two and a half metre high version entitled, Time destroying Beauty, hangs in the
Prado, Madrid. Including our picture, which has the identical figure of Father Time as the
Kassel work, (see illustration) these ‘Time and Truth’ subjects date from the last decade
of his career when Cerrini was in Rome having fully embraced the Baroque movement.
Gian Domenico Cerrini
Il Tempo rapisce la Bellezza
oil on canvas
49½ x 66½in (126 x 169cm)
Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, Germany
Born in Perugia, Cerrini first studied with the late Mannerist painter, Giovanni Antonio
Scaramuccia (1580-1633). In 1638 he moved to Rome where he reputedly entered Guido
Reni’s former studio or at least associated himself with the Bolognese masters such as the
Carracci, Lanfranco, Domenichino and later Guercino. It is undeniable that Reni and these
Roman-Bolognese painters had a long lasting influence on Cerrini’s style. However a clue
to a clearer understanding of this long neglected painter’s context in art history terms lies
in the subtitle to Francesco Mancini’s three hundred page catalogue (see bibliography),
Gian Domenico Cerrini, il Cavalier Perugino tra classicismo e barocco, which was written to
accompany the first major exhibition held in 2005 in Perugia. Accompanied by a panel of
specialists in seventeenth century Italian art, Mancini’s extensive research showed to
what extent Cerrini’s work, from his Roman and Florentine periods, was based ‘between
Classicisim and the Baroque’ as per the succinct catalogue title.
In the Eternal City Cerrini enjoyed success and received a lot of commissions quite early on.
His Holy Family with Saint Agnes and Catherine and a St. Ursula were his first major paintings
done in 1643 for the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane whose Borromini façade
singles it out as one of the archetypal baroque churches. But given the plethora of talent
amongst his Roman contemporaries then it is perhaps understandable why so many of his
paintings have been misattributed over the last few centuries. Despite their usually very large
size and distinctive chiaroscuro, more often than not, Cerrini’s pictures have been catalogued
as circle of Reni or attributed to other ‘migrant’ painters in Rome at the time, in particular,
Cozza, Romanelli, Sassoferrato, Sacchi, Gimignani and even the French Pierre Mignard.
However the presence of Cerrini’s pictures in all the established palazzi removes any doubt
that may have been cast over his status. It also proves that Cerrini, notorious for his nonconformity, was an independent master capable of winning commissions alone. The families
of the Colonna, (see his superlative 1650 St.Sebastian, Galleria Colonna, Rome) Barberini,
Chigi, Corsini, Pallavicini and Spada were amongst his principal patrons as well as, most
importantly, the future pope, Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi. In fact, as well as choosing Cerrini
to paint a series of frescos for the Santa Maria della Vittoria church in 1655, Rospigliosi
continued to commission pictures from him for over three decades. Ironically, this
Assumption of Saint Paul cycle of frescos in the Vittoria church became his most famous
legacy yet the cause of such hostility and jealousy that Cerrini, stung by widespread
criticism, would abandon Rome for several years.
In rebuilding and adding to the existing corpus of known Cerrinis, Mancini and company’s
research has come a long way in explaining the painter’s abrupt departure for Florence in
1656 at a moment when there seemed to be endless commissions. Successful or not, Cerrini
was still an interloper in Rome, a painter from the provinces who, having won favour with the
Spada family and the powerful Cardinal Rospigliosi, aroused envy and rancour. The Cardinal
and the Spada family, nonetheless, stood by him ensuring his swift entry to the Medici court
where he would spend six years working for Ferdinand II and his brothers. In Florence,
Cerrini befriended the Medici’s principal comptroller, Tommaso Fantacci, for whom we
now believe our Time revealing Truth was painted with many other pictures by him. Fantacci
became a leading patron of Cerrini independent of the Medici, yet many of these Florentine
pictures known from Medici inventories remain untraced today despite good evidence of
the quantity commissioned even when Cerrini had moved back to Rome in 1661. Further
research has shown that without Fantacci’s support, this self-imposed exile that bred so
much bitterness in Cerrini, did not actually land him any major commissions unlike his
Roman period.
Throughout the 1660s the ‘master of the agitated draperies’ entered his most baroque
period. He began a more two dimensional approach to larger figures right in the foreground
and his handling of the soft chiaroscuro enveloping his subjects’ limbs became increasingly
sophisticated. Cerrini amplified the drama in his models’ gestures and his undulating
draperies became folds and whirlpools of Florentine colour and light as if he wanted to
emulate and translate Bernini’s vitality into paint. Like sponges absorbing the ‘Late Baroque’
in Rome, his distinctive paintings took on more complexity. Taking into account these stylistic
changes, we can confidently place in date and context Time revealing Truth alongside the two
Kassel pictures and the Prado one. In Mancini’s esteemed view, the Prado’s Time destroying
Beauty is one of Cerrini’s finest achievements in terms of its compositional balance and
interplay of the statuesque Time and Truth figures surrounded by whirls of drapery.
There appear to be a few more recorded ‘Truth’ pictures in inventories yet to be ‘revealed’ but
why Cerrini chose this allegory and returned to it on a few occasions in the last decade of his
career remains unclear. A plausible suggestion might be that the rejection he experienced in
Rome early on had spurred him to success, but perhaps the sense of injustice had never left
him after all. Alone and with no documented pupils, Cerrini had always been an outsider thus
the parallels between his approaching demise and the need to ‘out’ the wrongs of the past
are too tempting to overlook!
We are indebted to Dr. Erich Schleier from Berlin for his invaluable help in identifying this
painting as a new addition to Cerrini’s work.
WILLIAM MITCHELL
7
A magnificent English warship, a two-decker of sixty or seventy guns, is seen from threequarters astern heaving to. On her poop deck is gathered a large part of the ship’s company,
and her sails are being variously backed or hauled down to take way off the ship. At the
starboard bow her best anchor is just about to sink below the waves. About the ship several
crowded pinnaces make their way towards her, and, not far off her starboard quarter, two
sister ships are seen on the opposite tack also taking in sail. Further beyond, across the
whole horizon, the rest of the squadron stands out to sea. This is a late masterpiece by the
great Dutch marine painter Willem van de Velde the Elder, presented for the first time since
it was last recorded at a sale in Germany nearly ninety years ago.
8
This painting is one of Van de Velde the Elder’s distinctive ‘pen paintings’ or penschilderij as
they were known in the artist’s native Dutch. At a time of renewed interest in the work of Van
de Velde and his son, Willem the Younger, the re-emergence of this canvas is nothing less
than a revelation. For it establishes that Willem van de Velde the Elder could still turn out a
highly detailed, competent ship portrait in his preferred penschilderij technique even in the
very final years of his life. It must be remembered that most of his pen paintings – seventyseven being a credible estimate – date from before 1672, and that only eighteen are recorded
from then on until his death in 1693. This pivotal change in his output is attributable, of
course, to the artist’s move to England with his son in 1672 or 1673, with its attendant
implications for their patronage and the value of their work.
upon their arrival in England and for nearly fifty years afterwards, the Van de Velde family
was paramount in the field of marine painting and brought popularity to the subject, which in
turn engendered a new domestic school of maritime art. Van de Velde the Elder himself had
grown up in the era of the flourishing first generation of Dutch realist marine painters – the
earliest in the history of art – and had been at work doing ship drawings en grisaille as early
as the 1640s. His presence as an established court painter in later Stuart England therefore
constitutes an important link between early Dutch marine art and the English sea painters of
the early Georgian period, among whom Charles Brooking was pre-eminent. (Brooking was
both the Van de Veldes’ greatest apologist and the finest English marine artist until Turner.)
Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611-1693)
An English two-decker lying-to at sea in a moderate breeze, with boats
pulling towards her
brush, pen and ink, and wash ‘en grisaille’ on canvas, 22 x 25in (56.2 x 63.5cm)
signed and indistinctly dated 169(?)
PROVENANCE
In the gilded history of picture collecting in Britain in the later eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, ‘Vandervelde’ became a generic term encompassing father, son
and workshop, to the point that their separate identities were suppressed. Indeed, it is this
writer’s belief that by the term ‘a Vandervelde’ the connoisseurs understood specifically
an oil painting by Willem the Younger, and that in their minds the father was dismissed as
merely a prolific, if assiduous, draughtsman. Nor were these noble collectors necessarily
mistaken, for it is generally agreed today that Van de Velde the Younger was a far more
talented artist, and that his influence on subsequent marine painters was the greater. It
is also the case nowadays, however, that ‘father’ Van de Velde’s work is excessively rare
compared to that of his son and that art historians have come to a greater appreciation of
the Elder’s stature as an artist.
Auction at Prestel’s, Frankfurt-am-Main, 18-19 Nov., 1921
LITERATuRE
M.S.Robinson, The Paintings of the WILLEM VAN DE VELDES, National Maritime
Museum, 1990, 2 vols., p.96, no. 796
As with so many artists, even ones as eminent as the Willem van de Veldes, the documentation
of their lives is fragmentary. There are few letters to turn to, and no mention by spirited Dutch
diarists of the time, only official records of births, marriages and deaths and instructions about
their work with the Dutch and, later, English fleets. Much about them has therefore, inevitably,
9
Willem van de Velde the Elder An English two-decker lying-to at sea in a moderate breeze, with boats pulling towards her
12
upon their arrival in England and for nearly fifty years
afterwards, the Van de Velde family was paramount in
the field of marine painting and brought popularity to the
subject, which in turn engendered a new domestic school
of maritime art. Van de Velde the Elder himself had grown
up in the era of the flourishing first generation of Dutch
realist marine painters – the earliest in the history of art
– and had been at work doing ship drawings en grisaille
as early as the 1640s.
This neat distinction does not, alas, survive closer scrutiny of the these artists, and
the huge quantity of paintings and drawings that the Van de Veldes produced has caused
considerable problems of attribution. Even Michael Robinson’s wildly ambitious attempt at
a catalogue raisonné of their combined efforts (see Literature reference on page 8) makes no
attempt to separate the work of father and son, and at the same time greatly overstates the
roles of studio hands in their authentic works.
It seems that at some point in the 1650s Van de Velde the Elder began to work up his careful
drawings into elegant and informative compositions for his patrons using the penschilderij,
or pinceel schilderijen technique. To quote one modern biographer, ‘He [Willem the Elder]
was not alone in developing pen painting, but perfected it to a degree far beyond the
ambitions or capabilities of its other practitioners’ (George S. Keyes, Mirror of Empire – Dutch
Marine Art in the Sevententh Century, Minneapolis Instiute of Arts, 1990, p.419). Intended to
furnish or adorn, Willem’s pen paintings were also expected to inform, and ships are drawn
therein with sufficient precision to be identified. (It is only a matter of time, we hope, before
the subject of ours can be named.) Acute observation of ships in action combines with a flair
for decorative composition in his battle scene paintings, of which good examples are The
Battle of the Sound (London, National Maritime Museum) and Battle of Scheveningen
(Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). The curiously static feel and over-stylization of his earliest
paintings are conspicuous by their absence in our example from four decades later. Indeed
the latter displays all of the technical interest of his earlier work but is, if anything – and
some good judges agree with this writer – enriched and mellowed by a harmony and
softening of tone redolent of an artist’s advancing years.
been left to conjecture, but the signal factual distinction between father and son is that the
Elder frequently went to sea throughout his life and, most famously, observed at close range
ships in action in several of the significant naval engagements of the Anglo-Dutch Wars.
Grounded in the tradition of the pioneering Dutch marine artist Hendrick Vroom (1566-1640),
there was no more patient and astute observer of ships than Willem Van de Velde the Elder,
and there are literally thousands of his drawings in existence today, ranging from rapid
sketches of sea battles to huge friezes commemorating the same events. His large-scale ship
portraits in black chalk with grey washes survive in their hundreds, too, as do those of his son
working in identical fashion. Indeed it has been said that ‘as a result of the Van de Veldes we
know more about the appearance of individual Northern ships in the seventeenth century than
we do of those in the eighteenth.’1
Pen paintings on canvas – as opposed to panel – begin to appear in Van de Velde the Elder’s
oeuvre in the mid-1660s, a notable example being The Battle of the Sound, 29 October 1658
dated 1665, bought by Cosimo de’ Medici in Amsterdam in 1667 (Florence, Palazzo Pitti, oil
on canvas, 143 x 300cm) Generally it may be said that his paintings become smaller and
more delicate in later years (see for example An English three-decker with the fleet in light
airs (1680), National Maritime Museum, BHC 0859). In Van de Velde’s penschilderij, outline
drawing with pen and brush in inks would be followed by cross-hatching and other
engraving-like techniques to produce shade and gradations of tone. Pale washes would then
be applied, as here to suggest volume in sails, to create a sea surface and sky. Before any of
this could happen, however, the white lead priming of the canvas over a gesso layer had to be
allowed to harden sufficiently to accept the artist’s methods and, lastly, his varnishes.
It is traditional to assume that Willem the Younger worked from his father’s painstaking,
often hard-won drawings to create his own remarkable oil paintings. Happily for scholars,
even wise King Charles II acknowledged their working relationship in his oft-quoted contract
of January 1674, in which he agrees to give:
In the well-charted, teeming waters of the golden age of Dutch art, the Van de Velde straits
remain comparatively little explored, and seem to have much to offer up. We are told that an
exhibition about them is planned for 2016 in Amsterdam; for this writer, at least, it cannot
come soon enough.
the Salary of one hundred pounds p. Annum unto William Van de Velde the Elder for
taking and making Draughts of seafights, and the like Salary of One hundred pounds p.
Annum unto William Van de Velde the Younger for putting the said Draughts into Colours
for our particular use.
1
E.H.H.Archibald, ‘The Willem van de Veldes; Their Background and Influence on Maritime Painting in England’,
Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, cxxx/5310 (1982), pp. 347-360.
JAMES MITCHELL
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14
Antoine Berjon (1754-1843)
A still life of flowers including lilac, roses, tulips and lilies in an urn with a basket
of fruit and a melon upon a marble ledge
oil on unlined canvas, signed lower right
with fine original period frame, 39¼ x 30in (97 x 76.2cm)
PROVENANCE
French private collection, Lyon, since the 1830s;
with John Mitchell and Son, 1983;
Private collection, England.
LITERATuRE
E. Hardouin-Fugier and E. Grafe, edited by P. Mitchell: French Flower Painters of the 19th
Century – A Dictionary. 1989, P. Mitchell, Ed.(cover illustration) p.89, ill. p.96
This is the first large oil painting by Antoine Berjon available for sale in over thirty years. Even
in the context of the Lyon school of flower painting, the richest in France, Berjon’s magical
qualities of originality, poetry and mystery were unmatched. In Berjon, France possessed one
of the most technically gifted still life painters in the history of the genre. And yet given such
a life span of eighty-nine years the paucity and scarcity of known and unknown paintings and
drawings has undermined his neglected genius. This very evident rarity has bedevilled the
chance to breathe new life into his work and, crucially, bring it to a wider audience.
There are three remarkable large oil paintings by him in the Louvre, in the Musée des BeauxArts, Lyon and in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and all share the same air of mystery
and tension present in this powerful composition. The careful arrangement of the fruit and
flowers and sharp delineation naturally display Berjon’s knowledge of Dutch still life from the
Golden Age, but the prominence given to the cut stem in the foreground and the distinctive,
white radiating light from the centre, including the ‘signature’ bee are hallmarks of his highly
individual style.
This spectacular still life of flowers stands out as one of Berjon’s masterpieces in its density,
vigour and grandeur. On first hand inspection this picture also neatly dispatches any claim
that Berjon was merely an accomplished flower painter taking his place behind his
undoubtedly more famous and successful contemporaries from the North, and all with
Flemish roots, namely, the van Spaendoncks, Redouté and Van Dael. As an equally superb
drafstman and colourist, Berjon was in fact a highly original artist. The satin finishes on his
roses, magical sheen of the basket, ethereal lighting and the daring and protruding cut vine,
to name a few keynotes, betray the hand of a rare and beautiful ‘Master’ in the best sense of
the term.
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Antoine Berjon A still life of flowers
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The discipline and conventions of flower painting have always presented a
challenge to the creative artist not felt by the craftsman painter. Among the
artists who have succeeded in expressing their personality through flowers,
Antoine Berjon is one of the most fascinating. Standing in front of his
pictures in the Louvre, Philadelphia, Lyon or a private collection fortunate
enough to include a Berjon, one instantly recognizes his hand and the
measure of his artistic personality. Seeing his work hanging together is to
realize that such a mastery of his subject, such evident individual emotion,
could only be the product of a prolific artistic output.
The young Lyonnais started out working for a silk manufacturer who
specialised in church vestments and embroideries although he had, in
fact, been destined for the Church – or becoming a doctor - before studying
flower design at Lyon’s Free School of Drawing. In 1794 a Revolutionary
Army staged a three month siege of the city, in the process destroying the
silk industry that had, at its peak, employed some 18,000 people fifty years
before. Together with many other young painters Berjon left the beleaguered
city to seek work in Paris where he could partly rely on some contacts and
silk designers. His first Salon exhibit in 1791 of three flower paintings and
a pastel of fruit and flowers found favour with the critics who compared
his work to the Empress Josephine’s favourite painter, Jan-Frans van Daël.
By 1810 Berjon was back in a revitalized Lyon firstly employed by the silk
manufacturers Bissardon and Bony who made the Empress’s coronation
robe and supplied silks for many of Napoleon’s palaces. Yet in July that year
he was appointed as the professor of flower design at the Ecole des BeauxArts. In thirteen years in this role Berjon taught over two hundred pupils but,
alas, his well-documented egotism and irascibility cost him his livelihood as
he was dismissed in 1823. He spent the last two decades of his life as a
recluse if not in poverty as the city gave him a generous pension. He was
honoured by a memorial exhibition of his works in Lyon in 1843.
Despite Berjon’s reputation of excellence amongst museums and collectors
around the world there has never been an exhibition of his elusive paintings
and drawings outside his native Lyon and not for want of trying. A future
exhibition should be aptly named, Antoine Berjon- Painter of Mystery.
WILLIAM MITCHELL
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Jean- Louis Prévost le Jeune (circa 1760-after 1810)
Bouquets of flowers in porcelain 'tazze' on marble ledges – a pair (2)
gouache on oval card
9¾ x 8in (25.5 x 20cm)
both signed
This exceptionally well preserved pair of flower bouquets painted in gouache display
all the hallmarks of the ‘Golden Age’ of French flower painting: technical virtuosity and
aesthetic sensitivity.
A pupil of Jean-Jacques Bachelier (1724-1806) in Paris, Prévost exhibited numerous
paintings and drawings at the Salons, and his last recorded entry was in 1810. unlike
his contemporary, Redouté, Prévost’s goal was not primarily scientific. His original
watercolours were used as models for a series of exquisite colour-plate botanical
books and references for porcelain and fabric pattern designers.
In 1987 Sotheby’s held the greatest sale of flower books in the 20th century, the de
Belder Collection. One of Prévost’s flower-pieces was used for the cover illustration.
WILLIAM MTCHELL
20
Alfred Stevens (1823-1906)
Trahie-Perplexité
oil on panel,
13½ x 10in (34 x 25.5cm) signed
PROVENANCE
Acquired by Colonel Merlin from the artist.
Merlin sale, Hotel Drouot, Paris, 27 June 1900, no. 36
Private collection, France.
EXHIBITED
L’oeuvre d’Alfred Stevens, Brussels and Antwerp, 1907, no. 48
LITERATuRE
G.Van Zype Les frères Stevens,1936, no.257
In April 1867 Alfred Stevens exhibited a larger version of this marvellous composition at the
‘Exposition universelle’, when all eyes were on Second Empire Paris with its high levels of
prosperity, advances in industry and dominance across the board in the arts. Napoleon III,
the Tsar, the King of Prussia, Bismarck and the Shah of Persia formally opened the giant
exhibition spread out over forty acres of the Champ-de-Mars.
In total there were eighteen Stevens paintings on display, thirteen of them single female
figures, earning the francophile Belgian a first-class medal.
This small, powerfully executed oil painting on panel is a recent discovery, long hidden away
in a private collection in France. Aside from the young lady’s prettiness, the typically Stevens
pyramid composition of the seated figure, the rich colours and exquisite details throughout
all show off Stevens working to the best of his considerable abilities. These small, intimate
single figure subjects are the finest endorsement for Stevens’ status as one of the leading
painters of his time; a claim familiar to readers of Gallery Notes and followers of our
numerous Stevens publications and exhibitions.
It is important to keep in mind that Alfred Stevens was strictly a genre painter. He did not
consider himself a portraitist and made no secret of his real and everlasting preference for
women as his sitters. Critics often lamented the lack of anecdote or narrative in his pictures
but there was far more to Stevens’ mise en scène than meets the eye. Nor was he the least
concerned by accusations of facile or empty subjects. Not only had he overcome and even
embraced his dual nationality working in the French capital, he also, bravely, opted to
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Alfred Stevens Trahie Perplexité
22
concentrate more and more on these enigmatic subjects with their unusual and ambiguous
titles, deliberately chosen by himself, as with the present picture. In this instance Stevens
knew exactly what he was doing: through remarkable draughtstmanship and understanding
of colour and its values, he could conjure an amazingly intimate scene. The viewer is left to
decide whether the young girl is portrayed heartbroken or merely bored, and so on. Despite
the oft-repeated motif of the letter, or faire-part, and its open inspiration from the pictures by
great Dutch Old Master genre painters such as Gerard Ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu, it was
ultimately his rendering of the dresses, gloves, hats and delicate japonisme that brought the
pictures to life. His brushes and adoration of the subject certainly breathed life into them but
such was his skill that his paintings never fell into the empty and sentimental nostalgia, now
so prevalent in nineteenth century specialist auctions and galleries.
Since my father’s exhibition in 1973, more paintings by Alfred Stevens have been studied,
exhibited, sold at auctions and acquired by dealers, collectors and museums than at any
other time since the turn of the last century. The large ‘set piece’ Salon interiors, garden
scenes with numerous figures and the élegantes by the coast have often brought his name
great commercial acclaim. Nonetheless, financial difficulties pushed Stevens towards
repetition and mass production and it is now all too clear that by the early 1880s his ability
to seduce his viewers had waned.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings has certainly had more than its fair share of the Alfred Stevens
market but we can confidently predict that Trahie Perplexité and other smaller pictures from
his ‘power’ years will prove to be his best legacy.
WILLIAM MITCHELL
This small, powerfully executed oil painting on panel is a recent
discovery, long hidden away in a private collection in France. Aside
from the young lady’s prettiness, the typically Stevens pyramid
composition of the seated figure, the rich colours and exquisite
details throughout all show off Stevens working to the best of his
considerable abilities. These small, intimate single figure subjects
are the finest endorsement for Stevens’ status as one of the leading
painters of his time.
If we were to gauge the character and popularity of Guillemet from the company he kept,
our long-standing study of his life and work would suggest a decidedly heady social
existence. He could count Daubigny, Corot, Manet, Cezanne, Barye, Stevens, the Morisots
and, closest of all, Zola as his friends. But appearances were deceptive. For over thirty
summers, Antoine Guillemet would make his home among the oyster gatherers and
fishermen on the Normandy coast. Dressed in a shabby smock and boots, the familiar,
tall figure must have resembled something of a weather-beaten and distracted recluse
with his easel and paint box in tow.
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This exceptional beach scene painted at Villerville to the west of Le Havre proves to what
extent he rivalled or, arguably, exceeded Boudin and Daubigny as the unofficial painter of the
Normandy coast. His first important Salon exhibit in 1872, Mer basse a Villerville, now hanging
in the Grenoble museum, was a major critical success. Of the four most important Villerville
landscapes, two are in French public collections, Grenoble and Caen. The other large 1881
Salon exhibit, Le vieux Villerville (Antoine Guillemet, John Mitchell and Son, London 1998, p. 19)
is in a private collection in South America and the fourth, seen here, has never been available
for sale until now.
Having handled more than a hundred Guillemet paintings since the 1970s it has become
so apparent to us how, in his self-imposed seasonal isolations at the coast, he must have
revelled in the timeless combinations of sky and windswept clouds, of the sea and the sweep
of the horizon. Guillemet’s diaries and copious correspondence record an endless quest for
excellence urging him to tackle the same subjects again and again. Our archive has more
than forty photographs of Guillemet paintings of St. Vaast-la-Hougue and Villerville. It is no
mere exaggeration on our part that this Villerville ranks as one of the finest pictures from
Guillemet’s long career as one of France’s leading ‘non-impressionist’ landscapists.
Although most of his contemporaries were the future Impressionists (he too had initially been
a fellow refusé in 1866 and 1867), Guillemet, like Manet, preferred to keep to traditional paths.
Manet did more for his friend than just immortalise him in his famous Le Balcon (Paris,
Musée d’Orsay) where Guillemet appears as the tall, rather urbane man standing behind
Berth Morisot and Fanny Claus, with a cigarette in his hand. Manet also influenced the
younger artist towards a painterly, impasto style of brushwork which would remain a strong
characteristic of Guillemet's work throughout.
Antoine Guillemet (1841-1918)
Villerville
oil on unlined canvas
21¼ x 29in (54 x 73.5cm) signed
with fine original period frame
LITERATuRE
P. J Mitchell Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, a loan exhibition. London 1981, cat.10, pl.18, p.53
P. J Mitchell Antoine Guillemet John Mitchell and Son, London 1998
cat.4, pl.17, p.18
When repeated successes at the Salon won Guillemet a place on the Salon jury in 1881, it
gave him the right to introduce one painter without opposition. Seizing his chance, he went
for Paul Cézanne who had always been refused the admission – and recognition – he craved.
This was how Cézanne could appear for the first time ever, listed as a pupil of Guillemet!
Once he had become one of the 'Establishment' figures with a high rank in the Legion of
Honour and many Salon medals, Guillemet was always respected for his unwavering
encouragement of others.
With several paintings acquired directly from the Salons by French museums, Antoine
Guillemet was over the years awarded almost every medal, honour, and distinction available
to nineteenth-century French artists.
WILLIAM MITCHELL
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Otto Scholderer (1834-1902)
Lepus europaeus
oil on canvas
42 x 24¼in (106.6 x 61.5cm)
with fine original frame
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jutta M. Bagdahn, Otto Franz Scholderer (1834-1902) Monographie und Werkverzeichnis,
Hannover (2002), pp. 79-80
Peter Kropmanns, Etudes: Otto Scholderer, la collection La Caze et Chardin, Revue du Louvre.
La revue des musées de France. 2003, pp. 76-82
A few years before his death, the German-born Scholderer wrote to Fantin-Latour about his
ongoing admiration for Chardin: “As always I keep thinking what a great artist he was, not
just in his delicate and almost spiritual method of painting but the fact that his ideas were
so original and almost naïve” (quoted in Revue du Louvre, Paris 2003, p.80).
Hanging alone against a spare kitchen or larder wall, this life-size hare is very close in style
and brushwork to Scholderer’s Nature morte, gibier (Bremen, Kunsthalle). Still-lifes of dead
hares feature throughout all European paintings, in particular in Dutch seventeenth century
work, but the iconic and immediately recognizable ones – and most reproduced today –
came from the French painters, Oudry and Chardin.
In 1870 Henri Fantin-Latour painted a large group portrait to exhibit at the Paris Salon. Its
official title was Un atelier aux Batignolles and it became one of his best known paintings, as
well as an instantly recognisable image of the early Impressionist period. Today it hangs in
splendour in the Musée d’Orsay. Seated at his easel with brushes and palette in hand, the
central figure is Edouard Manet surrounded by seven friends. Standing apart from the group,
behind Manet, is Otto Scholderer who was the only foreigner and non-resident in Paris in the
portrait. The other friends in the portrait were Bazille, Zola, Renoir, Edmond Maitre, Zacharie
Astruc and Monet. The previous year they were referred to as the ‘Ecole de Batignolles’ by
the Salon art critic, Louis Duranty, and the name stayed with them. At the time there could
have been no better proof of Scholderer’s well-earned status as a still life and portrait painter
than to be included in Fantin’s 1870 painting.
Scholderer was born in Frankfurt into a family of teachers. Having shown a lot of promise
as a violinist, by 1854, aged twenty, he was studying with the revered landscapist from
Karlsruhe, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. Through his teacher, Scholderer befriended the
Francophile Victor Müller who promoted modern French painting throughout Germany.
Thanks to Müller’s support and friendship Scholderer moved to Paris in 1857 where he
finally met Fanitn-Latour and Courbet whose work especially he had so admired earlier
in the decade at exhibitions in Frankfurt.
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Otto Scholderer Lepus europaeus
28
Otto Scholdorer
Miss Elizabeth Bruel
pastel on paper on canvas, 43½ x 30in (110.5 x 76.2cm)
signed and dated 1889.
The J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. USA
Whilst studying and copying paintings in the Louvre the still young Scholderer fell under
the spell of Chardin’s paintings, an enthralment he enjoyed for the rest of his life. From then
on his association with his two mentors and other contemporary French painters remained
social rather than professional as he chose to style his work as a traditional ‘Old Master’,
or more aptly a ‘Chardin Revivalist’.
Scholderer returned to Germany in the 1860s, establishing himself as a still-life painter and
portraitist but remained in close contact with his fellow painters in Paris through frequent
visits and correspondence.
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Scholderer happened to be in Paris but
was forced to return to Munich. While some of his French friends and colleagues including
Bazille and Manet enlisted for action, others fled to safer cities, many to London.
Scholderer’s fiancée, Luise Steuerwaldt, had been staying with friends in London in 1869 and
1870 and now decided to move there persuading Scholderer to come with her. In March 1871
Otto and Luise were married in Roehampton. No one could have forseen that they would stay
in London for another twenty eight years. By the time the ban on German nationals living and
working in France was lifted in the early 1870s Scholderer was too ensconced in London life
to want to return. Living in Battersea Rise and working from a studio in Soho, with a strong
community of Germans there, Scholderer entered the busiest period of his artistic career,
painting portraits and still-lifes as well as landscapes with a predominantly English clientele.
We first encountered Scholderer’s work in 2009 when we discovered an exceptionally wellpreserved pastel portrait by him of a striking young woman, Elizabeth Bruel. Wholly intrigued
and attracted by its quality rather than any prior knowledge of his work, we sold the beautiful
pastel, dating from the artist’s London period, to The J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville,
Kentucky (see above).
WILLIAM MITCHELL
Looking south over his native Geneva, Töpffer’s beautiful plein air study shows Mont Salève
in the background. The towers of the city’s cathedral, Saint Pierre, stand out above some
poplars with Lac Leman hidden by a big stand of trees on the left. Painted in oils on prepared
paper, Töpffer contrasts the olive greens and russet coloured trees of the orchard and woods
with the pale purple of the far-off hills under a delicate morning sky.
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Despite its small format, the compact composition creates much pictorial space and depth
suggesting a larger and more formal composition would follow back in the studio. However,
more often than not, Töpffer made these sketches as separate motifs to be incorporated
into his genre scenes as well as his large Salon landscapes. The recently published,
comprehensive catalogue raisonné by Lucien Boissonnas, printed in 2011, illustrates a few
dozen small but accomplished landscapes mostly painted on the spot. All of them are
topographically precise and many depict panoramic vistas in the Geneva canton and further
afield. Their topographical accuracy proves that Töpffer considered himself a landscapist
as much as a genre and portrait painter, a fact that is often overlooked as his outdoor tavern
and fêtes scenes tend to be reproduced and exhibited more. Indeed no exhibition on Swiss
painting is ever without a formal genre painting by Töpffer. Yet large format pictures aren’t
always the most desirable; a tavern scene, dated 1805, was acquired from us by the Musée
du Louvre twelve years ago but only measured 12 x 15 inches.
Töpffer’s demise is, morbidly, one of the most quoted biographical details about him! His
daughter, Ninette, found her highly industrious father dead at his easel. Whilst in fact true,
the anecdote becomes less grim on looking through the above mentioned catalogue raisonné .
As accomplished and prolific a painter as he was, Töpffer also excelled at watercolour
portraits, genre scenes, landscapes and, more famously, his satirical caricatures which
loosely resemble Rowlandson’s work.
Wolfgang-Adam Töpffer (1766-1847)
Geneva and Mont Salève seen from near Petit-Saconnex
oil on paper
11 x 16¾in (28 x 42.5cm)
with fine original period frame
PROVENANCE
Artist’s granddaughter, Adèle Töpffer
By descent, private collection, Switzerland.
LITERATuRE
Wolfgang-Adam Töpffer Lucien Boissonnas, Benteli Verlag, no.250, p. 241
In 1786 the twenty year old Töpffer was sent by the Geneva Société des Arts to Paris where
he underwent training with the portrait painters, Francois-Xavier Fabre and Jean-Baptiste
Suvée. Having befriended the leading animal painter and fellow Genevan, Jacques-Laurent
Agasse in Lausanne a few years before, Töpffer wasn’t a complete novice in Paris. He soon
showed promise until the Revolution forced him to return to Geneva where he became
commercially successful as a portrait and landscape painter.
In 1798 he sent his first submissions to the Paris Salon where he established relationships
with Boilly and Demarne which eventually led to patronage back in Geneva from the Empress
Josephine who bought five landscapes from him in 1803. By 1805 Töpffer was receiving
commissions from the Russian royal family and Austrian and Italian royalty. In 1822 he cofounded the Société des Amis des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, by then incorporated into Switzerland,
where Töpffer remained the leading Swiss painter until the mid 1840s.
WILLIAM MITCHELL
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JOHN MITCHELL
FINE PAINTINGS
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We hope that in receiving Gallery Notes you will share the interest and enjoyment which
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James Mitchell
james@johnmitchell.net
William Mitchell
william@johnmitchell.net
David Gaskin
david@johnmitchell.net
James Birtwistle
jamesb@johnmitchell.net
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